Salamin
Presentations in conferences are typically classified into oral or poster presentations. Obviously, oral presentations are reserved for those topics which are considered “hot” and of higher appeal to the intended audience. If you want to increase your signal-to-noise ratio (here, signal pertains your scientific work, in contrast to noise, which is what everyone else is talking about), oral presentation is the way to go. This is the best way to get maximum exposure or visibility to other researchers. Indeed, this can be conveniently thought of as “parallel visibility.”
Posters, on the other hand, allows you to discuss your work to one person at a time. In contrast to oral presentations, this only allows “series visibility” of your work (and thus, lower signal-to-noise ratio). Nevertheless, this allows more in-depth discussion of your results, and even offers the possibility of networking with other people interested in your work. Some valuable ideas could come up as a result of these in-depth discussions – something that doesn’t usually come by way of an oral presentation, which is of course constrained due to time limitations.
In the biannual meetings of the Japan Society of Applied Physics (Nihon Oyobutsuri Gakkai), there are even sessions where both poster and oral presentations are combined. These are called short oral presentations with poster. Oral presentations are given for 5 minutes (usually in the morning), followed up by a 2-hour poster session (usually in the afternoon). Oral presentations usually just give a highlight of the main results, which allows the audience to choose which more interesting results to go to during the poster session.
If I were to choose, however, I would prefer an oral presentation. I find poster presentations particularly tiring, especially because most poster sessions I attend are usually two hours long. If there are is a considerable number of people who are interested in my work, that usually means that I have to stand and talk for the entire two-hour duration! Also, most of the interesting results related to my work tend to be presented in the same session, so this also means that I miss out on discussing those results with the concerned poster presentors because I have to attend to my own poster. Of course, this can also be conveniently circumvented by sneaking out of one’s poster presentation and doing the rounds of other posters. For a two-hour poster session, I think the best compromise would be to stay at one’s poster for about 1 hour, then use the remaining hour to check out other people’s posters.
What about you, what is your preference? Oral or poster? 🙂
things can be clarified if you present your work in oral presentation.
I like poster presentations. One, because I like making posters. It’s one of the few occasions in research when I can be creative/artistic. Two, I like being able to talk about my research for at least an hour. And that’s not including the time needed for people to read my poster.
In an oral presentation, 15 minutes is all I have to yak about my research. Then there’s a Q&A portion that’s about 5-10 min long. That’s a really crappy deal. When I’ve spent so many years on a research, I want to be able to talk more about it.
It’s a pity though that poster presentations seem to have a “2nd class citizen” status in conferences – going by people’s conventional perception. However, judging by the fact that best poster and oral presentations are awarded the same amount, they officially are supposed to be equal. Maybe someday, posters will earn their rightful place in conferences.
Hi! I think it would really depend on what you want to share and how good you are in imparting the idea to others. Most would say that oral presentations would be better than poster, however, not all speakers are effective in relaying the message across. I even know of situations where good papers turn out bad simply because the presenter is not effective, so if you know if you would fare better in a poster presentation simply because you would be able to avoid having to speak to a bigger audience, then go for poster, if you are brave enough to face the crowd, nothing shoulf prevent you from making an oral presentation.
Thank you for sharing!
Why not both? I usually do this to maximize advertising of one’s work 🙂 but of course also depends on the confidence and breath of the research done. There are times that an oral presenter does not even receive a single question, or a poster presenter does not even receive a single visitor in cases where the research topic is “not so hot” anymore after spending 2-5 years of your life on it. In that case, I would recommend to go on tourism instead :-(.